Re: Borland marketing?

Serge Dosyukov (Dragon Soft) wrote:
>
> * Delphi 2005 has been around for almost a year

<Rudy> Huh? </Rudy>
AFAIK it's been out for almost exactly 6 months. That's not 'almost a year'
by any stretch.
For serious work, I've never actually adopted a new Delphi release any
sooner than 6 months after release; it's always proven to be wise to wait
for the inevitable service packs (except for D7 - it came so late it was
almost pointless; hence, I never even got around to adopting D7!). The 6
months has typically also been the 'lag time' for most 3rd party components
and plugins to come up with stable releases of their product for the new
Delphi's.

> <...> many of the free components freeze in D5/D6/D7
> state... with number of component falling down as we go. People do
> not do it for fun anymore.

This trend (which has been noted before) is not necessarily a 'bad sign'.
There may be fewer 'pure hobby' offerings in the component arena, but I
think this is due to the maturing of the Delphi and Windows developer
community in general. Developers are shying away from 'experimental/fun'
components (esp. those w/o source), as 'commonality' and 'standard look and
feel' within Windows apps have been embraced as a developer creed.

Furthermore, the VCL has matured, and the informal knowledge base of
'how-tos' - accumulated over 10 years of technical NG posts in the borland
forums - is sufficient to aid the overwhelming majority of Delphi users in
creating perfectly usable and 'standard' UI's without resorting to
unsupported freeware with non-standard behaviour from Torry's and the like.
The versioning (configuration control) problems associated with uncritical
integration of 3rd party components in the IDE has been an incessantly
wiggly can of worms, only recently has a practical remedy for this problem
become available with JED's Configuration Manager.

> * There is no fun to work with Borland products - price, style,
> quality, job demands, just old...

sorry to hear that you feel this way, personally I enjoy Delphi just as much
as ever.

--
Kristofer


.

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